@elonmusk quote: "I am the reason OpenAI exists. Uh, I named it OpenAI after open source. Um, it is in fact closed source. So it should be renamed super closed source for maximum profit AI.
Elon Musk, the world's richest and most powerful innovator, has repeatedly branded Sam Altman Littlefinger, the ultimate Game of Thrones schemer and swindler who would sell out humanity for personal power and profit. Musk warned Altman would hijack OpenAI, trash its nonprofit benefit-humanity charter, and turn it into a closed profit-obsessed monster racing toward AGI with zero guard rails. But Musk wasn't just right about Sam Altman's evil intentions. He also foresaw exactly how greed would drive OpenAI's catastrophic downfall.
Every detail since, including the suspicious death of whistleblower Suchir Balaji, feels anything but coincidental. Sam Altman's reaction to being accused of murder is bizarre. It's not possible to look more guilty.
Elon Musk and Sam Altman first crossed paths in Silicon Valley's elite circles in the early 2010s. A Y Combinator partner, Jeff Ralston, made the introduction. Altman earned a personal tour of Musk's SpaceX rocket factory, where he witnessed Musk's ironclad conviction about making humanity multiplanetary. "AI is probably the single biggest item in the near term that's likely to affect humanity. So it's very important that we have the advent of AI in a good way. We really need to make sure it goes right." That left a lasting impression. Altman later admitted it set the benchmark for what conviction looks like. Their bond grew through 2014 emails on AI dangers and regular Wednesday dinners in the Bay Area. By early 2015, the true turning point came in June at the Rosewood Hotel on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. There, in a private room, Altman, Greg Brockman (then Stripe CTO), Musk, Ilya Sutskever, and top AI minds gathered to confront Google's unchecked race toward dangerous AGI. That dinner lit the fuse for OpenAI.
Born in 1985 in Chicago and raised in St. Louis, Altman was a child prodigy hacker who got his first Apple Macintosh at age eight and immediately started coding and tearing hardware apart. He attended the elite John Burroughs school, came out as gay, then dropped out of Stanford after just two years to chase startups. At 19 in 2005, he co-founded Loopt, a location-based social app that joined Y Combinator's very first batch. "So Loopt is launching. You were speaking on a panel earlier and my understanding is that you guys are about to launch. We're going to roll it in the Bay Area. A new feature called QES." It raised over $30 million from Sequoia and NEA but never took off and sold in 2012 for a modest $43 million. Even back then, the red flags were glaring. Loopt employees were so fed up with Altman's deceptive and chaotic behavior that they tried twice to oust him as CEO. Reuters later exposed that Altman had wildly inflated user numbers, claiming far more than the actual 500 users. He promised proof and never delivered.
During the process of the sale, Altman joined YC as a partner in 2011 and became its president in 2014. As president of the world's most prestigious startup incubator, he crowned himself Silicon Valley's ultimate kingmaker with unparalleled access to promising founders and early-stage companies. Yet he quietly created his own venture capital firm, Hydrazine Capital, and directed up to 75 percent of its investments into YC companies—deals he only knew about because of his powerful position at the incubator. As president of YC, he was by design not supposed to make such cross-investments to avoid any conflict of interest and to maintain trust in YC's neutrality. Instead, he used his official role for personal enrichment, betraying the very trust placed in him as president. This blatant self-dealing was so egregious that by 2019 Y Combinator founder Paul Graham had to fly from the UK to San Francisco to personally dismiss Altman over concerns that he was neglecting his duties to focus on personal priorities. To smooth his exit, Altman unilaterally announced his promotion to chairman without partnership approval and later continued falsely listing himself as chairman in SEC filings for years from 2019 to 2023, despite never actually holding the position.
But this was just the beginning of his evil schemes. By the time he met Musk in 2015, Elon couldn't have ever imagined how far that scheming would reach. The alliance imploded fast. By early 2018, Musk saw OpenAI falling dangerously behind Google and DeepMind. He proposed aggressive solutions: massive new funding, leadership shakeups, and even a Tesla merger to accelerate safely and win the race. Altman and Brockman shut every idea down cold, refusing to surrender control. Musk, refusing to watch the mission die, resigned from the board in February 2018. "The danger of AI is much greater than the danger of nuclear warheads by a lot. Um, and nobody would suggest that we allow anyone to just build nuclear warheads if they want."
Freed from Musk's oversight, Altman wasted zero time betraying every principle OpenAI was built on. He became sole CEO, quietly engineered a for-profit subsidiary in 2019 that gutted the nonprofit charter's spirit, and locked in an exclusive multi-billion-dollar partnership with Microsoft, handing control to one of the planet's most powerful corporations. "Well, who's in control? Yeah. And what exactly is the relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft? Um, and I do worry that Microsoft actually may be more in control than say the leadership team at OpenAI realizes. Um, I mean, Microsoft as part of the Microsoft's investment, they have rights to all of the software, all of the model weights and everything necessary to run the inference system." So they essentially have a great deal of control. At any point, Microsoft could cut off OpenAI.
ChatGPT launched in late 2022 and exploded, minting billions and inflating OpenAI's valuation into the hundreds of billions. But safety was sacrificed, and it wasn't long before his antics caught up to him. In November 2023, OpenAI's own board—including Ilya Sutskever—fired Altman for not being consistently candid in his communications. She pointed to a toxic atmosphere, psychological abuse, sketchy safety processes, and accused Altman of outright lying. Although Altman was eventually reinstated as CEO, it was only downhill from there. The next product he had in store, Sora, became the poster child of failure. It hit a million users fast, but 90 percent quit within a day. Only 2 percent stuck around after a week, and half of those gave up by day 30. It burned $15 million a day in GPU compute for a measly $2.1 million lifetime revenue. The app was shut down and Disney withdrew their investment of $1 billion.
After the shutdown of Sora, all that has fallen apart with Disney pulling their investment and cutting any partnerships with OpenAI. Generally, most of the responses we've been seeing online has been to celebrate the demise of an app that ultimately served very little purpose. But it wasn't just the general public who was happy to see OpenAI's downfall. More than 10 of its high-ranking executives resigned in 2025 alone. The resignation that probably hurt Altman the most was Dario Amodei. He had already walked out years earlier and founded OpenAI's biggest competitor, Anthropic, explicitly to resist Altman's betrayals on safety and commercialization. "Our position is clear. We have these two red lines. We've had them from day one. We are still advocating for those red lines. We're not going to move on those red lines. One is domestic mass surveillance. Case number two is fully autonomous weapons. This is not the partially autonomous weapons that are used in Ukraine or could potentially be used in Taiwan today. This is the idea of making weapons that fire without any human involvement. If the DoD, the government, doesn't like the services we provide or the way that we make them, they can use another contractor."
The opportunistic Sam Altman would move almost immediately to grab that very same contract just hours later. "Anthropic's relationship appears to have ended, but OpenAI is ready to make a deal." This evening, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on social media the company had reached a deal.
And then there is the suspicious death of ex-OpenAI researcher Suchir Balaji, who publicly criticized OpenAI's illegal copyright scraping as not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem and was named a likely witness in the New York Times lawsuit. Then found dead from a gunshot to the head in his San Francisco apartment in November 2024. "So you've had complaints from one programmer who said you guys were basically stealing people's stuff and not paying them and then he wound up murdered. What was that?" Uh, he committed… "Do you think he committed suicide?" This is like gruesome to talk about, but I read the whole medical record. Does it not look like one to you? "No, he was definitely murdered. I think there were signs of a struggle. Of course, the surveillance camera wires had been cut. He had just ordered takeout food, come back from a vacation with his friends on Catalina Island. No indication at all that he was suicidal—no note and no behavior. He had just spoken to a family member on the phone. And then he's found dead with blood in multiple rooms. So that's impossible." This was like a friend of mine. This is like a guy that—not a close friend—but this is someone that worked at OpenAI for a very long time.
Balaji's mother, however, had a different story from what Altman was saying. His mother claims he was murdered on your orders. Musk immediately declared he was murdered. "Look, I don't know if he is guilty, but it's not possible to look more guilty. So I'm like, all signs point to it being a murder. Not saying, you know…"
Elon's convictions about Sam Altman run so deep that he did not just criticize him in public. He has taken the fight to court seeking the removal of Altman as CEO of OpenAI. Elon Musk's lawyers asked to have CEO Sam Altman and president of that company Greg Brockman removed from their roles at OpenAI. As a legal remedy, they now asked to strip those executives of what they call authority and personal financial benefits they extracted from OpenAI's illicit for-profit operations and conversion. The backdrop here: Musk sued OpenAI, which he also co-founded, alleging that he was manipulated and deceived after OpenAI explored converting to a for-profit. Jury selection for that trial kicks off in a few weeks here in San Francisco. And Musk is now seeking more than $100 billion in damages from OpenAI. And codefendant Microsoft now says it would actually return what he calls ill-gotten gains to OpenAI's nonprofit arm.
OpenAI today is exactly what Musk warned it would become: a corporate profit-driven, safety-compromised machine that abandoned its nonprofit charter, its open-source roots, and in the process, humanity's best interests. The 2023 board ouster tied to deception and reckless AGI acceleration, the growing pile of lawsuits and fraud allegations, and Altman's long pattern of manipulation stretching all the way back to Loopt only reinforce why Elon Musk has kept speaking out against him. But as dangerous as Altman already appears, the reality is even darker.
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